In May last year, as the world was convulsed by the COVID-19 pandemic and global infections topped 4 million, a strange video began appearing in the feeds of some Facebook users.
“Climate alarm is reaching untold levels of exaggeration and hysteria,” said an unseen narrator, over a montage of environmental protests and clips of a tearful Greta Thunberg.
“There is no doubt about it, climate change has become a cult,” it said. “Carbon dioxide emissions have become the wages of sin.”
Illustration: Yusha
The video’s reach was relatively small: It was viewed somewhere between 15,000 and 20,000 times, Facebook data showed.
However, more videos came over the following weeks, each one experimenting with slightly different scripts and visuals. All focused on the supposed irrationality and hypocrisy of climate campaigners and the hardship they want to inflict upon society’s most impoverished communities. “Those who demand action on climate change continue to fly around in private jets from one virtue-signaling climate conference to the next. Is this fair?” said one, against a backdrop of Leonardo DiCaprio and Britain’s Prince Harry delivering speeches from lecterns.
Between May and July last year, the advertiser spent less than ￡3,000 (US$4,026) disseminating 10 videos. Collectively, they were viewed more than half a million times.
At one stage, users hovering over the logo of that advertiser — a British organization called the Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF) — were informed by Facebook that it was a “science site.” The GWPF is not a science Web site: It is the campaigning arm of a well-funded foundation accused by opponents of being one of the UK’s biggest sources of climate science denial.
The videos being tested by the GWPF in the spring and summer of last year were part of a strategic pivot away from explicit climate crisis denialism, and toward something subtler — a move being pursued by similar campaigners worldwide.
Welcome to a new age of what atmospheric scientist and environmental author Michael E. Mann has labeled climate “inactivism”: an epic struggle to convince people not so much to doubt the reality of climate crisis, but rather to dampen their enthusiasm for any attempts at dealing with it.
In mid-July, more than a year on from the GWPF’s video advertising campaign, the British government published its long-awaited plan to decarbonze the transport system, now the country’s biggest source of carbon emissions.
As is increasingly common these days when it comes to big, set-piece environmental announcements, the proposals — phasing out sales of polluting vehicles and eliminating the aviation sector’s carbon footprint as part of the UK’s goal of becoming a net-zero nation by 2050 — were greeted with cautious approval from most quarters.
The climate sector was broadly positive, but so too was the transport industry, as well as figures from across the mainstream political spectrum. When critics did speak out, it was nearly always to say that the plan’s targets did not go far enough.
However, there was a dissenting voice: Conservative Party lawmaker Craig Mackinlay, elected representative for South Thanet, a far-flung promontory on the eastern edge of Kent, which is now home to a bitter struggle over the future of a disused local airport.
“Make no mistake, this requires a radical transformation of every part of the economy and our freedoms,” he said in an article for Conservative Home. “As ever, it will be the poor who suffer most from these elite delusions.”
Mackinlay, who has described Britain’s net-zero aspirations as a “social calamity,” saying that “sooner or later, the public will rebel against this madness,” was not alone in framing decarbonization through the lens of cultural division and class privilege.
“This policy was wrong-headed from the start, dreamed up in the kitchen diners of Notting Hill, with no understanding of real people’s daily lives,” Conservative Party lawmaker Julian Knight said in a report published by an all-party parliamentary group chaired by Mackinlay that supports cheaper fuel for motorists.
Steve Baker, another Conservative lawmaker and a close ally of Mackinlay, has dismissed the Committee on Climate Change, an independent group that advises the government, as “unelected and unaccountable.”
Public debate over the environment once pitted people who believed in the reality of anthropogenic climate change against those who questioned it. Today, with a firm majority of every demographic group in the UK in agreement that humans are warming the planet, and that this poses a serious danger, the battle lines have been redrawn.
“The great underreported story is how normalized all this has become. Those who want to see action on climate change, in many ways, have won the argument,” said James Murray, editor of the Web site BusinessGreen and a leading environmental commentator. “That is now the consensus view: It has the nominal support of every government and science academy on the planet, and crucially it’s where the money is.”
With outright climate science denial relegated to the fringes, opponents of urgent action on climate emergency have been forced to switch tack.
Alongside pro forma acknowledgments that climate breakdown is happening and vague commitments to a greener future, the inactivists — a loose coalition of fossil-fuel interests, conservative ideologues and supportive politicians and journalists — seek to redirect responsibility for the problem away from the fossil fuel industry and toward individual consumers, as well as developing nations.
When solutions to the climate crisis are proposed by inactivists, they tend to be timid and unambitious, with faith in future as yet unrealized “green” technologies held up as a reason to shy away from serious structural changes now.
Yet there is now an even more powerful weapon in the inactivist armory.
It comes in the form of an appeal to social justice, one that casts environmentalists as an aloof, out-of-touch establishment, and the inactivists as insurgents, defending the values and livelihoods of ordinary people.
“The biggest single threat to the net-zero transition is a culture-war-style backlash that heavily politicizes this agenda and spooks governments into moving more slowly,” Murray said. “At present, it’s on the periphery, but as the past few years have taught us, ideas that were on the periphery can become very influential, very quickly.”
Attempts to mobilize anti-elite sentiments against climate activists are nothing new, but popular anger at the economic insecurities that are synonymous with 21st-century capitalism has provided an opening for any political forces presenting themselves as radical outsiders, fighting on behalf of the voiceless masses.
On the right, these grievances have been fused with a cultural resentment toward highfalutin virtue-signaling and liberal elites. It is here that inactivists have spotted an opportunity to harness some of the antagonism toward prevailing power systems and use it to undermine support for what they see as unaffordable climate action.
As decarbonization efforts expand into the realm of people’s everyday lives, touching on the ways they heat their homes, for example, or the vehicles they own, that task has become easier.
Those efforts have been aided further by social media platforms, which have enabled the rapid spread of disinformation and helped fuel social division.
For the environmental sector, seemingly gaining ground in the fight for hearts and minds, this evolution of the climate wars has been a dislocating experience. Not only are progressive campaigners being forced to defend themselves against charges of elitism, but they are having to do so within the confines of privately run “walled gardens” such as Facebook, where profit-seeking algorithms determine whose voices speak loudest and those seeking to push culture-war narratives find fertile ground.
As an example of what the new battleground looks like, climate activists point to power outages in Texas last winter that were erroneously blamed by many right-wing US pundits on the failures of wind power.
Over the course of just a few days in February, millions of Internet users were subjected to disinformation about the blackouts, including a viral image of a helicopter supposedly being sent to de-ice a frozen Texas wind turbine, which was actually taken in Sweden many years earlier.
“The implications of all this on our ability to campaign are huge,” said Michael Khoo, a communications specialist who works with Friends of the Earth. “We needed to master this new environment, and be able to understand and respond to what’s happening in real time.”
That is exactly what Khoo and many of his colleagues are attempting to do. In the run-up to COP26, more than 30 leading organizations came together to develop a new set of tools capable of monitoring the online spread of inactivist messaging and anticipating the next Texas blackout campaign before it takes off.
The ongoing project is being led by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), a think tank better known for its work tackling hate and extremism. It has so far yielded valuable insights into the shape of climate debates across Europe, such as the “national sovereignty” arguments being used to defend coal mining in Poland and the entwining of anti-EU sentiments with inactivist climate messaging in Hungary.
It has also led to a major report exploring the global spread of “climate lockdown” alarmism, in which hard-right activists and COVID-19 denialists have found common cause in driving fear of pandemic-type lockdowns that they say will soon be imposed by tyrannical governments at the behest of environmentalists.
In May, DeSmog — a journalism platform that aims to expose and eliminate the “PR pollution” around climate breakdown, and one of the project’s partners — first noticed a newly trending Twitter hashtag: #CostOfNetZero. It was being pushed by Baker, a newly appointed GWPF trustee.
Using ISD’s tools, researchers were able to map the sources of tweets containing the hashtag and the relationships between them.
“What we found at that stage was that it was basically just Baker and his allies continually retweeting it to create the impression of there being a lot of concern around this issue,” said Mat Hope, a former DeSmog editor.
“We were able to show that it was a manufactured controversy, not some authentic insight from somebody with their finger on the country’s pulse,” Hope said.
However, in the months that followed, disquiet over the net-zero transition began increasing in sections of the British press, initially in outlets such as Spiked Online and GB News, but eventually creeping into the pages of major newspapers such as the Daily Telegraph and the Sun, too.
In August, The Spectator magazine printed an image of banknotes tumbling into a void on its cover, with the headline: “The cost of net-zero.”
By September, right-leaning media commentators were homing in on the government’s aim of gradually phasing out gas boilers as part of the decarbonization plan, and replacing them with air or ground-source heat pumps.
The far greater economic costs of inaction on climate crisis were rarely mentioned in these reports.
By autumn — as a growing cost-of-living crisis began to dominate the news agenda — the GWPF had rebranded itself as Net Zero Watch, a new parliamentary grouping called the Net Zero Scrutiny Group led by Mackinlay had been formed and Westminster insiders were reporting on widening splits within the Conservative Party over the entire net-zero transition.
“The fact is you don’t need a majority of the population behind you to create a myth-making frenzy like this; you can do it with a very small minority and a set of media outriders,” Murray said. Members of the Net Zero Scrutiny group reject the suggestion that they are espousing a new form of climate science denial.
“What I want this group to be is a clearing house, a balanced academic facility where we get all sides of the argument,” Mackinlay has said.
The idea that decarbonization is inherently elitist is a myth, peddled largely by political figures who have shown little concern for deprived communities in any other context, and who ignore the fact that without a net-zero transition it is the very poorest — globally and domestically — who will suffer most severely.
Yet like all effective myths, it is founded on a kernel of truth: namely that under successive governments, political decisionmaking has felt remote and unaccountable, the rich have got richer, and life for a great many of the rest of us has grown harder.
The Isle of Thanet lies on the northeastern edge of Kent, where a narrow channel once severed it from the mainland. It has become known as a place of deprivation, and as an electoral bastion for the nationalist right.
It is also a microcosm of the climate culture wars, thanks to a fierce tussle over the fate of Manston International Airport — a former Royal Air Force base. By the early 2010s Manston was losing up to ￡10,000 a day, and the airport finally shut its doors in 2014.
Since then, the mammoth site has been earmarked for housing, a manufacturing site and even a film studio.
However, what some in Thanet really yearned for was a functioning airport once again.
“Manston is part of every local person’s DNA,” said Martin Sutton, an aviation engineer who was based at the airport for many years. “It was a community, and a massive asset to the area.”
In 2019, that dream took a step closer to reality when the site was acquired by Riveroak Strategic Partners (RSP).
RSP announced plans to spend ￡300 million transforming Manston into a global air freight hub.
Mackinlay and Thanet’s other Conservative lawmaker, Roger Gale, welcomed the development wholeheartedly, but others in the area felt differently.
With a runway approach route that lies directly over Ramsgate’s historical town center, many residents opposed any resumption of flights and said that, in light of the country’s net-zero commitments, the UK should be reducing its aviation emissions rather than expanding them.
When RSP’s proposal was given the go-ahead by the national government last year, despite the British Planning Inspectorate recommending a rejection, the Green Party described it as “a senseless act, which places the economic benefit of a small number of people ahead of the well-being of everybody else.”
Jenny Dawes, a 74-year-old who moved to Thanet nine years ago, began crowdfunding to cover the legal costs of a judicial review that would challenge the government decision.
With the support of a network of local anti-airport campaign groups, she raised more than ￡100,000, and — in an outcome that shocked almost everybody — succeeded.
In February, the British Department for Transport formally withdrew its development consent order for the cargo hub and began its consideration process anew.
Now, once again, Manston’s fate is uncertain.
For campaigners on both sides of the Manston debate, the degree of animosity involved has been overwhelming.
“I’ve been called a toxic wart, a KGB agent, and — my personal favorite — a contentious socialite,” Dawes said.
In interviews with dozens of people in Thanet for and against the airport, there have been allegations of vehicles being scratched and spat at, anonymous accounts hurling abuse online, boycotts of local shops and meetings having to take place in private living rooms rather than pubs or cafes for fear of sparking open confrontation.
Part of the reason is that, far from being a straightforward planning dispute, conflict over Manston has become inflected by many other dynamics such as housing, poverty, regional inequality and political disillusionment.
The charge that Manston’s opponents are indifferent to the economic opportunities provided by a reopened airport because they are financially comfortable is a common one, although largely unjustified: In reality, locals from all walks of life are to be found on sides of the airport divide, and the amount of work that would be created by the cargo hub is hotly contested.
RSP say it would generate 23,000 jobs within two decades, while others say that there were only 150 people employed at the airport when it closed.
However, local unemployment rates, particularly among young people, are some of the highest in the country, and the jobs that do exist are often to be found in the seasonal or gig economy. Major local employers that once provided a steady career path for school-leavers have shut up shop.
Today, Thanet has the highest level of child poverty in the county, and is ranked among the most deprived 10 percent of all English regions.
“The coastal towns have always attracted some wealth, and there’s always been a great deal of impoverishment, and because of that demographic divide it’s easy to stoke division, said Deb Shotton, vice-chair of the Thanet Green Party. “The rubbish that Mackinlay spouts is going to get an audience.”
It would be easy to frame the Manston dispute as one that pits indulgent environmentalists against ecological vandals, divorced from the reality of climate change.
However, the vast majority of airport supporters interviewed said that tackling climate breakdown was a major priority for them, and that they were convinced that technological advances such as the advent of electric planes would enable Manston to reopen without threatening the country’s net-zero transition.
Opponents of Manston are aware of Thanet’s urgent need for new jobs; they just do not believe that the solution should come in the form of a project that, according to RSP’s own projections, would be responsible for nearly 2 percent of the UK’s aviation emissions by 2050.
Somewhere in all this, there is a glimmer of shared ground visible, which offers hope not only to Thanet, but to the very many communities around the world that are also navigating today’s interlocking crises of climate breakdown and economic insecurity.
Adam Corner, an independent researcher who has helped lead studies of public attitudes on climate change, said the fact that the mainstream climate debate is now an argument over the costs and fairness of climate breakdown mitigation, rather than the science, is itself a sign of progress.
“This is the biggest show on earth,” he said. “It’s changing everything... At least we are now seeing these questions for what they are, and what they have always been really, which is political: a conversation about social choices and collective priorities, which is a conversation that on all kinds of levels we desperately need to have.”
Without rapid action on climate breakdown, in a few decades from now the whole of Thanet is projected to become an island once again.
The new climate wars are making that outcome more likely, but although the inactivists cheering them on might be cynical, their root causes are real and cannot be ignored.
Thanet’s story so far — of long-term decline and uneven restoration — is familiar to great swathes of the UK and beyond. If its next chapter is to prove more hopeful, it must be written collaboratively and carry an entire community along with it.
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